17 Quotes by Peter Temple

In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe.They were going to have brunch.The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.

A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.

For some men, life seems to be one long attempt to escape childhood and all the fears of childhood. That's what many of us are doing.

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Football makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.